Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Detail: vagary: detail: detail: curse word: detail: non-sequitur.

I spent my morning running around, meeting with people I already met with, sending emails about topics I'd already sent emails about to people who said they would do something but who neglected to inform me that they would be involving other people... who didn't do the something that I asked the first person to do.

Yesterday afternoon, I got an email from an executive who's been working on the Wellness Fair I have been largely responsible for bringing to to my deparment. Does that sentence look right to you? It looks wrong. Anyway, when we were in the inital stages of planning, I met with the guy in charge of the building in which we want to have the fair. It's here at my work location but a bit of a jog up a hill, about a 10 minute walk away. Also in the meeting was a woman from [somewhere else] who has done this many, many times before. In fact, the guy we were meeting with is the guy she works with on her other events, at other departments. They know each other well enough that they hugged before our meeting. So we went over all the things we needed to go over; mainly, that due to possible funky weather in March, she wanted to hold the event inside his building. Not a problem, he said: we can just move all this [junk] out! Can we get parking, she asked? Sure! He said.

It was a great meeting, congenial, fun, eye opening. Then came the email from yesterday afternoon, which said that the cool dude I met before was estimating that in order to move the [junk] from his building, it was going to cost "$4000 to $6000." Apparently this exceeds the budget by about $3000 to $5000.

All fuckin' hell broke loose. Suddenly there were about 5 more loose ends. People were having selective memory loss (though luckily I have a ton of emails to back up any "he said, she said" type situations). People who were supposed to be informed, weren't.

I'm not sure that any of this was my fault. Way back at the beginning of this little adventure, I received permission for all the planning this would require from my boss's boss, and his boss (in writing, in an email). In that email, he instructed the lady who is doing most of the forgetting to help me out. Still, it was really nerve racking, because there was no way we were going to be able to pay that (insane) amount.

This morning, the woman who plans these events and I went up to talk to the first guy again. He explained about talking to the woman who forgot things, and he explained that dollar amount (which, face to face, suddenly was much, much lower). He also said it might be hard because his crew has about 4 jobs already scheduled for the date of our event (which he's known about for about a month; he never mentioned any of this before). He's a sweet man but he likes drama, I think. During our meeting, the woman and I kept giving each other the "panicked" face. Hers is good. I've never seen mine but I can imagine what it looks like. We straightened out what we could straighten out without the higher ups (who were all in the same executive meeting; of course they were), and then I went down to talk to my boss's boss's secretary to see if I could see or talk to him sometime today.

He seems like a nice guy and for a long time I really liked him and had no problem talking to him. But my boss has said a few things that have worried me in the past, and I've done that thing I try not to do, which is to let someone else change the way I feel about somebody, even though my experiences have all been pretty much positive. Now he makes me insanely nervous. I asked his secretary if he might have 10 minutes to talk to me, and she put me on his schedule for 3:30, but when I got back to my desk, he called me within about 15 minutes. I was surprised. I explained everything to him, and apologized for bothering him. He made a few calls and then called me back in about 10 minutes with a solution (we will do whatever it takes, pay whatever it takes, make whatever effort necessary to have this event take place). He sent out an email to all the players, and reminded them that they need to work with me and the other woman to get this thing going, no matter what. I think I'm just going to go back to the original way I felt about him, and let her issues with him be her own baggage. Having nerves with someone like him is acceptable but I have no reason not to trust him, so I'm just going to trust him.

I felt much better afterwards but even more so after I went to Chipotle for a big-ass burrito. Did you know they have brown rice now, and that if you ask them, they will make your burrito with 50% brown and 50% white rice? It's a good day to find that out.